The Dayside : The Federal Bureau of PhysicsDate: Tuesday, July 29, 2014 @ 01:11:58 EDTTopic: General

By: Charles Day (Physicstoday): Since July 2013, the comic series FBP: Federal Bureau of Physics has been telling the story of Adam Hardy, whose job at the titular agency is to fix anomalies in the physics of reality.

When readers encounter Hardy for the first time, he's been summoned
to the vicinity of a Los Angeles high school, where Earth's gravity has
abruptly weakened and students are joyfully floating. To restore the
gravitational field, Hardy and his FBP colleagues deploy a truck-sized
device called a compaction and compression unit. The "C&C" mends the
problem's source: a rupture in the spacetime membrane.

The reason the US needs the services of the FBP is spelled out in the blurb volume 1, which collects the first seven issues:

Quantum tornadoes. Localized gravity failures. Bubble dimensions.
Inescapable vortices. The fabric of the universe is weakening, and the
brave men and women who risk their lives to repair it work for the
Federal Bureau of Physics.

To compound the drama wrought by misbehaving physical laws, the plot
also involves personal and corporate treachery, along with Hardy's quest
to discover how his father, a famous physicist whom Hardy never knew,
died.

As far as I can tell, the series' author, Simon Oliver, does not have
a physics background, but he does read physics books as part of his
research for the series. In an interview
published last year on the website Killray, he said, "Even if I end up
twisting an idea for my own needs I like to have it rooted in a real
idea or concept."

Of course, twisting the laws of physics is often the main ingredient
in science fiction. But can such twisting profitably serve other ends?

Second Life physics

That question popped into my mind earlier this year when I encountered a paper on the arXiv preprint server about teaching physics through Second Life,
a vast online virtual community. Although Second Life has a powerful
physics engine to ensure that cars, airplanes, and other objects move in
seeming compliance with classical mechanics, the author of the paper,
Renato dos Santos of the Lutheran University of Brazil in Canoas, points
out that Second Life's physical laws differ from Isaac Newton's. Those
differences, Santos contends, can be used to teach students how physics
works in the real world...